Dr. Les Joynes

About Dr. Les Joynes

Recipient of the 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award, Dr. Les Joynes is a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi. Dr. Joynes (b. Santa Barbara, California) is trained both in administration and arts and is exploring new models for museums of the future especially engaging communities in South Asia. He is particularly exploring the role of museums in the preservation of culture in South Asia. Trained in the 1970s under professional photographers, Dr Joynes had his first museum exhibition at the age of eighteen at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California. Since then he has visited over 1,200 museums in the Americas, Europe, North Africa, and across Asia. He served as lead curator for Networking in Japan which featured as part of the UK-Japan Cultural Year and served on the Curatorial team of the Inaugural Taipei Biennial “Sites of Desire” exhibition in 1998 - since then he has curated and produced exhibitions in the UK, France, China, Japan, Mongolia, South Korea and upcoming in India and Sri Lanka.

Advising and museum research

Active in museums since 1981, Dr. Joynes is exploring the future of museums. He has advised US and international organizations including Du Pont de Nemours, 3M, General Electric, Bayer, Braun, Dow, and General Motors. He has conducted museum research for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and lectured at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, the Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing, and presented on his research museums of the future at Museum 2050 at the Long Museum Shanghai. As a multimedia artist, Les first began exhibiting his work at eighteen at Santa Barbara Museum of Art and has since collaborated with art institutions in the UK, France, Japan, Brazil, China, South Korea, Mongolia and India.

Publications

Dr Joynes has written on contemporary arts for Art in America, Flash Art, Springer, the Journal for Artistic Research and his work has appeared on NHK Television, Sculpture Magazine, Commons & Sense Japan, Art Monthly and CCTV. He is author of “Interfacing Technology with Site” ISEA International Symposium of Electronic Art, Gwangju, Korea (2019); New Institutional Models: China’s Cultural Landscape by Mid-Century, Long Museum, Shanghai (2018); Going Beyond: Art as Adventure (2018) O’Neill,  R and Werner, J (eds.), Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. (2019) ; Anywhere v.1.(2015), Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne and New York: Parsons School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons, New School, New York. (2015); Inside Out Art Museum, New York: LeRoy Neiman Foundation [catalogue] (2015); Art and Research at the Outermost Limits of Site Specificity, Newcastle, Australia: University of Newcastle, (2014); Octopus, Journal for Visual Culture. Irvine: University of California, Irvine (2011); ”Multi-spatial Performance: at Bauhaus-Dessau, Bühnenstudios der Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau [Internet] (2008); Yoshitomo Nara, Art in America (1997); London and the New Pathetic, Springer (1996). His writing and artwork has featured in Museum 2050 published by the Long Museum of Art, Shanghai, Art in America, Flash Art, Art Monthly London, Commons and Sense Japan, NHK Television Japan and the Journal for Artistic Research.

Awards

He is recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award India (2020-2022), US Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs Grant for Colombia (2020), US Department of State American Arts Incubator ZERO1 Award for Performance Art and Technology (2019), Fulbright Hays US Public Diplomacy Award, Mongolia (2014) and China (2017), CEC ArtsLink Foundation Grant, St. Petersburg, Russia (2017), Renmin University of China Merit Award for Teaching, Beijing (2017) , Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) Language Scholar National Cheng Kung University (2016), Wheatley Foundation Fellow, Birmingham City University, UK (2016),US Department of State Field Research Fellow, American Center for Mongolian Studies (2016, Research Fellow, Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) University of the Arts London (2015), Artist Fellow, Nordic Artists Center Norway (2008) and Edwin Austin Abbey Fellowship, New York (2009), Bauhaus Foundation Fellow, Dessau, Germany (2009), Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture Scholar (Monbusho) (1998-2001), Erasmus Scholar, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts, Paris (1995).

Teaching

He teaches Modern and Contemporary art history and multi-media experiential practices at Renmin University in Beijing with lectures at University of Cambridge, Teachers College, Peking University Institute of Cultural Industries, University of California Santa Barbara, University of the Arts London (UAL), University of Coventry, and the Bard-Smolny Program in St Petersburg. He is visiting faculty at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Arts at Visva Bharati University in West Bengal and the Royal University of Bhutan. Les is a member of the ICF and IOC Affiliate of Harvard Medical School, the American Alliance of Art Museums, and member of the Museum Committee at College Arts Association.

Education

With combined training in arts, administration and leadership, Les completed his MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London, Masters in Fine Art from Musashino Art University, Japan, PhD in the UK, Post-Doctorate at University of Sao Paolo in Brazil, MBA from California State University, and M.Sc from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences.

Coaching and Leadership

Dr. Joynes is founder of Museum.coach and initiated Museum Leadership and Coaching at the Yale Center for British Art at Yale University..A graduate of the NYU coaching program, he is a Leadership Coach to MBAs, EMBAs and MFAs at Columbia University and PhDs at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also a GoldAward Mentor at Goldsmiths, University of London.